Jolly Harbour, Antigua.
Innamorata
Steve & Carol
Sat 24 Feb 2024 17:00
17:04.534N 061:53.718W We had a lovely sail up to Antigua, we left in a convoy of 15-20 boats - everyone had been waiting for a good weather forecast, the wind was a little light for us so we had genoa, main and mizzen up, after a few hours the faster lighter sloops had all got away and very unusually we were left sailing with 3 other ketches - all of whom we overtook 😁, Innamorata put on a pretty good show and seemed to be enjoying the sail as much as we did, Nefretari - one of the boats took some pictures of us going past, I did take some pictures of them but mine were very blurry!  We made the 48 mile trip in good time and arrived at Jolly Harbour and were anchored by 3pm. The following day we had the joy of checking in we had already done the on line pre arrival forms, we set off fairly early and already there was a queue of people, Only Steve could go to the offices and first it was Port health official, then it was customs, immigration, port authorities and then back to customs to get clearance form! At each of these offices Steve had to fill in the same information on bits of paper 🙄 - the whole process took over an hour and even then we didn't have the correct money to check in - its only EC$ 85 so $35 - we had a few US$ but not enough and had left the € on the boat they weren’t too bothered and said we could pay tomorrow - Antigua uses East Caribbean $ but places usually accept US$! The best thing about checking in was that we did get to meet a few other boaters including owners of 2 of the ketches we sailed up with - which is how we met Karl and got the pictures! Of course the ATM’s wouldn’t give us any money - seem very temperamental for anyone with foreign bank cards so the following day we went and paid in a mixture of US and € because of course they couldn’t give any change! this time we met up with a couple we had seen in Deshaies and ended up going to a cafe with them for drinks and a chat. Next we hit the supermarket - it had a good array of produce including many Waitrose items but at such a price we did get a few treats but couldn’t really justify paying the silly prices for imported items, local produce like pork and chicken wasn’t that expensive though! We stayed at jolly harbour for a few days - met up with Stefan and Emma on Pintail again and had a lovely evening before we headed down to Falmouth harbour to catch up with Sarah and Mike on Komotion who we last saw in Las Palmas! |